Ra Ra Riot played the Converse Rubber Tracks show at The Sinclair last Wednesday, clinic and Allston Pudding got to sit down with bassist Mathieu Santos to discuss everything from pre-show rituals to swag and Police cover bands. (#localangle: Santos grew up about an hour south of Boston in New Bedford.)

Allston Pudding: What do you typically do right before you go on stage? Do you have any rituals or things you do before every show?

Mathieu Santos: We do, normally backstage we’re pretty quiet. There’s a lot of MacBooks around. Usually between sound check and the show maybe we get dinner, people are reading, playing video games, but we always try to connect before we go on stage and get in the same headspace. Sometimes we’ll just listen to some music, someone will play DJ and we’ll get up and get a little loose and dance a little bit. One thing we do always do is put our hands in the middle like a little sports team, have a quick pep talk and then we’ll think of something to say on 3, and it changes every day. It’s usually an inside joke from earlier in the day.

AP: Does somebody just yell something random?

Santos: Yeah usually it seems like my unofficial job to come up with the thing that we’re gonna say.

AP: What’s your plan for tonight?

Santos: That’s a good question. Usually I wait until the last minute and then something comes to me but since we’re in Boston, it might be “Go Bruins.” It might be “Converse is cool” or something.

AP: What kind of music do you listen to backstage?

Santos: It’s usually pretty different. It depends on who gets control of the iPod. But there was a phase where we were listening to “Wouldn’t it be nice.” That’s a fun, happy sing-along that strangely pumps you up a bit. As for lately we’ve been sort of in a hole the past couple months just working on new music and I feel like whenever we’re in that phase we forget to listen to other music because we’re so focused on what we’re doing. What I’ve been doing lately is just putting my iTunes on shuffle and just going with whatever comes up. I saw St. Vincent earlier this year and the show was absolutely incredible, so that was really cool. I feel like I’m pretty out of touch. I saw Blonde Redhead last week playing some new songs from their new record. Honestly, I’ve just been listening to a lot of the Police lately because a few of us started a Police cover band.

AP: You’re starting a Police cover band?

Santos: Yep, we have our first gig in a few weeks. Middle of October. [ed. note: A Humiliating Kick In The Crotch plays a sold out Union Hall in Brooklyn this October.]

AP: What was the best concert freebie you’ve ever gotten?

Santos: Converse shoes – those are up there. I got this really nice blazer once and I wore it so much it’s totally disgusting now. That’s actually my favorite. But maybe the best thing I got, I probably shouldn’t be saying this, was a Samsung Galaxy thing, which I promptly sold on EBay for a large profit, so that was my favorite thing in a different way. Mostly we just get a ton of shoes. So I like that.

AP: Has anything really notable ever happened right before you went on stage?

Santos: Actually, I have a great answer for this. We were playing in Ottawa, at the Ottawa Bluesfest a few years ago, and it took us two days to drive up there. Drove one day, stayed in Syracuse for a night, drove the rest of the way there, crossed the border, loaded in for sound check stuff. The show is outside, and it’s a multi-stage festival.

It was literally right before our set, we were on stage doing light check, the whole crowd is there, and we’re looking at the sky and it just looks like the worst, most ominous sky I’ve ever seen in my life. Just absolute blackness, and the wind is really picking up, then it dies down. Then the concert promoters came on stage and said, “You guys should go back in the trailer, we think there’s a really bad storm about to hit.”

But all of our stuff is on stage. So we were sort of dilly-dallying and they came back and said, “You need to get off the stage right now.” So we ran back into the trailer, locked the door and all of a sudden this intense storm descends. We’re seeing chairs and tents flying by, and the trailer is shaking, and somebody is banging on the door, so we open it and they said “Everyone has to get under the bridge now!” Basically there was a tornado coming. So we just sprint out into this field and it’s just absolute chaos. There’s chairs, debris, booths blowing all over the place. Luckily nobody died but some people did get really hurt. So we were just sliding down this mud embankment under a bridge and all these bands are helping each other.

And it was absolutely insane. And then this crazy storm passed after like three minutes and we all climbed back up, and everyone was completely soaking wet and covered in mud, and we got back up and the main stage was gone. It had collapsed. It was like a movie. We came back up the hill and we were like, “Alright is everyone okay?” And then we look over and where there had been the big stage it was just not there anymore. And then we saw it had collapsed back onto all these trailers with all these bands’ gear in it. So we knew a few bands that had all their gear destroyed.

All of our stuff was still on stage so when we went back up we were dumping water out of our keyboards and stuff. But everything was totally wrecked, there were ambulances and fire trucks everywhere. Nobody died, thank god. But it was pretty insane, and then we weren’t able to get our stuff for the next couple hours because they thought maybe our stage was going to collapse too. So our stuff was just sitting there in puddles.

AP: So then you didn’t play?

Santos: No, so then they were like, “okay you can go home now.” So we just drove all the way back home. It was like a four-day trip and we didn’t do anything. So that was definitely one of the most exciting things that’s ever happened on tour. A tornado hit just as we were about to play.

AP: So you played Boston Calling last year, and that was in support of Beta Love, the most recent record. Do you guys plan on changing up how you perform the new material?

Santos: Probably not. I know there’s some bands who like to improvise a lot every night and that’s really fun, but once we figure out how to play a song we pretty much never change arrangements. I’m probably not selling this very well, but our show is basically the same every night. But come out and see us multiple nights! But normally we have it figured out and have it dialed in, and the way we function best as a band is to play it the same but make it .01 percent better every night. Maybe halfway through the tour we’ll change the set, but as far as the arrangements we don’t really change it much. We’re playing more with backing tracks now so we’re sort of married to that now, for better or for worse.

AP: You mentioned you’re working on new material – is any of that going to make it into the set tonight?

Santos: No, not tonight. We were just saying how fun that would be, but all that stuff is pretty early stages still. Mostly making it on the computer and we haven’t played too much of it together as a group yet. But hopefully if we have random shows like this later this fall maybe one or two will sneak in there. It’s always really helpful to break in new songs live before you get into the studio to record them.

AP: Is the new stuff going to be more electronic sort of like Beta Love was as opposed to the earlier music?

Santos: I think in some ways Beta Love definitely feels like a jumping off point. It just feels like the next logical step, but also we’ve been talking about how the new music in whatever form it’s in right now feels a little bit like Beta Love mixed with The Rhumb Line, our first record. We’ve been trying to write with a [different] mentality. With the last two records we were like, “what can we do in the studio, how can we make this more refined?” But when we were writing The Rhumb Line we were still in college, and we were gearing the music toward most of the venues that were playing. Mostly house parties. So we were thinking more like, “how can this be more fun, how can we arrange this to make the crowd react more and dance more?” So we’ve been thinking about having more of that live immediacy, bringing back more old arrangements while still using a lot more electronic elements. To us it’s a little bit of everything. Looking back we’re looking at what were our strengths. But we’re really getting into the zone with a lot of this MIDI stuff and synths. So we’re sort of trying to take all our strengths and exploit them a little more. And our weaknesses too, it’s good to exploit your weaknesses.

Read our review of the Ra Ra Riot show here.